Death by Ugliness — THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME and FRANKENSTEIN
they were so ugly they died.
Disclaimer: This is NOT a Frankenstein’s Monster fan page. I personally think both Victor and his creature were ignoble c*nts of the highest degree, but I’m trying this new thing called ‘being mature and objective’, so let’s see how that works out for me.
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What exactly differentiates YOU from someone else?
Today, it can range from political opinions to pineapple on pizza. In Gothic novels, it was the shape of your head.
In my list of four Gothic reads for Spooky Szn, I recc’d Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, whilst purposely leaving out Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein because the latter has been done to death. The truth is, the two have a fair bit in common, namely because they centre around their butt-ugly ‘protagonists’ (which will be in quotation marks from here on because ALL the characters from both books are morally grey AND certifiably insane).
While the motives of Quasimodo and Frankenstein’s monster are indeed questionable, a lot of the ridicule they are forced to endure is mainly attributed to their ‘abnormal’ appearances. This isn’t a unique narrative — “beauty equals goodness” has been a popular trope for centuries — but it was an especially popular trope in Gothic fiction, and has been allegorised in novels like Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray, amongst others.
But WHY were Gothic writers so obsessed with looks and its correlation with beauty, exactly? It’s possibly a combination of factors.
1. Having a ‘big head’ meant something else in the 19th century.
The connection between ugliness and villainy is grounded in pseudoscience-y nonsense that can be traced back to Ancient Greece (what isn’t, at this point?).
Basically, folks in ye olde days believed that your physical features were indicative of your behaviour. It’s called physiognomy, and even Leonardo da Vinci was guilty of it — according to him, if you have frown lines, you’re likely short-tempered. And if this already sounds ludicrous, get this: it even has an offspring, phrenology, which was the study of how the shape of the skull could be used to predict one’s personality.
Physiognomy really gained traction in the 1700-1800s, thanks to the biggest fangirl of physiognomy, Swiss philosopher Johann Caspar Lavater (who wasn’t much of a looker himself but ok). He was so deep in the Kool-Aid that he even claimed one’s character could be predicted by their silhouette. Their SHADOW. Yeah, bro was definitely smoking something.
Interestingly enough, Lavater admits that the reasoning for this line of study “stems from the innate and inexplicable anxiety of another’s duplicity and capability for deception”. Because we can’t tell one’s character until getting to know them, we rely on what we can see — the physical body: good is always beautiful, and evil is always ugly.
Dumb, but I get it. And as Shelley and Hugo (and most Gothic writers) were quirky non-conformists amidst the Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment era, I’m sure they had a blast playing around with these notions.
2. Good old garden-variety bigotry
The second reason is that people were funny back then. Not funny ‘ha-ha’, funny ‘xenophobic’.
Don’t get me wrong, people are still funny now. But before globalisation was a thing, people of colour in white-dominant countries were rare and generally vilified. And, of course, I’m focusing on white-dominant countries here because that’s where these novels take place.
Edward Said breaks it down succinctly in his seminal work ‘Orientalism’, in which he defines ‘Othering’ as the processes through which “individuals or groups are pushed and pulled into outgroups and in-groups".
Tl;dr (‘too long, didn’t read’ for all my non-Redditors) — think high school cliques, but on a macro scale.
Othering can be an almost logical experience. For example, Frankenstein’s monster, whom we shall call Richard for the sake of my poor fingers, wasn’t shunned from society just because of his looks; it was also because he went on a murderous rampage and killed innocent people for shits and gigs. (RIP Henry Clerval, I would’ve swiped right on you.)
Othering can also be a more insidious process in which the narratives and actions of one group’s views are based on how they view another’s appearance. This facet is more evident in the case of Quasimodo, who is othered purely because of his physical differences — which are very many, as Hugo will have us know.
The diction of ugliness
Quasimodo and Richard are human or human-resembling but perceived as inherently inhuman. Take a look at how Frankenstein describes Richard:
“His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.”
The words “horrid”, “yellow skin”, and “black lips” are all carefully chosen to illustrate the physical differences between Richard and the prevailing majority of white humans.
In many other instances, Richard is also greeted by deprecatory terms such as “wretch”, “filthy demon”, and “vile insect”. The point is clear: You may possess the resemblance, cognisance, and sentience of a human being, but if you don’t check off all the physical features of what is deemed ‘the normal way to look’, you’re a weiiirdooo.
Being white doesn’t necessarily exempt you from Othering, either. On top of a highly detailed description of his deformities, Quasimodo is frequently labelled “the devil” (not a devil, but THE devil, mind). Other key insults worth highlighting are “not a child, but an abortion of a monkey”, “a beast, an animal”, and “the fruit of a Jew and a sow; something not Christian”.
The people of Paris believe Quasi wasn’t created by God simply because he looked different. Since Christianity was a core tenet of French society at the time, this was a peak 15th-century roast. Just don’t forget to season with anti-semitism.
Of course, this sort of language was only a tool used by Shelley and Hugo to incite sympathy from readers; they didn’t actually hate their mains. To mitigate the dehumanisation her monster receives, Shelley lends it its own narrative and tells most of the story through its POV.
Hugo chooses a different tactic. He ‘re-humanises’ Quasimodo by placing him in the centre of the monument of French national pride, Notre Dame. This is saying a lot, since we know Hugo had the biggest hard-on for that old cathedral.
This technique serves to create an interesting paradox within the story: the vilified living in the grandest place of worship, and the vilifiers in the squalor of the streets, which produces a highly-textured dynamic that prevails throughout the novel.
The (literal) languages of erasure
Spoken languages and speech also play a big-ish role in both Hunchback and Frankenstein.
After Richard manages to escape the confines of Frankenstein’s lab, it comes upon a few books in its hideout — one of which happens to be The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe and has enough relevance to be a whole post of itself. But anyway, Richard teaches itself to read and speak English. And, I mean, without Duolingo?? That’s a feat by today’s standards.
Victor Frankenstein disagrees, however. He confesses to his new pal Walton that his creature is “eloquent and persuasive”, but this comes with a caveat — the creature is the ‘bad guy’, and therefore being articulate is just one of the many viles it possesses, which leads Victor to append: “but trust him not. His soul is as hellish as his form”.
So Richard could’ve mastered Mandarin, one of the most challenging languages to learn, and it still wouldn’t have changed its perceived wickedness and identity as the Other. Just like there’s no way for Quasi to overcome his physical deformity and prove himself worthy of kindness.
In fact, Quasi comes across as more pitiful because he is deaf, lame, and one-eyed — he doesn’t even get a chance to defend himself. To top it off, he is only too painfully aware of his circumstances, which we see manifest verbally when he declares his feelings for Esmeralda. Esmeralda was then like, “What love? LOL”, to which Quasi responded “The love of the damned”. #feelsbadman
This acknowledgement of and surrender to his otherness is truly what makes his fate complete and tragic. *sad noises*
In the end, it is their differences — if only in appearance — that dictate their place in society. The value and consequential effects of these differences easily outweigh their intelligence or purity of soul, and both eventually succumb to them.
The final nail in the coffin
American sociologist Irving Horowitz claims that to successfully Other someone, you have to alienate them, ‘first from the objects of the world, then from people who denote the normal, and finally from the ideals and ideas about the world that are held by the people who occupy it.’
So now that Quasi and Richard have been adequately insulted and rebuked by the normies, it’s time for the final stage of their Othering — to chuck them in some gorgeous, picturesque place for extra ✨CoNtRaSt✨. Hence, we have Quasi swinging about in Notre Dame and Richard gallivanting around the Swiss countryside.
Ah, Switzerland. The unblemished land of Rolexes, fondue, and chocolate [translation: sophistication, ease, and refinement]. With Europe representing the civilised sphere of the modern world at the time, the sight of Richard popping up around its scenic locales like a glitching Whack-A-Mole machine was preposterous and gag-inducing.
And so it became that the very idea of the creature inhabiting normal LAND, that their God made for living things to live on, is problematic. Richard then becomes akin to a ‘filthy savage’ from someplace F-F-FOREIGN!!! *crosses self*
Quasimodo, too, has no place in the world, being the fruit of a Jew and all. He resides in Paris, arguably the seat of European culture at the time, in the cathedral of Notre Dame, which — I must reiterate on Hugo’s behalf — is not only considered an architectural marvel, but one of the highest symbols of French culture at the time. Comprendre???
Yet, within this idyllic setting manufactured by human brilliance, Quasi remains the Other, “cut off forever from the world by the double fatality of his unknown birth and deformity”. We can do nothing but watch as he is ruthlessly offered up to Horowitz’s reading of alienation, kind of like a sacrificial pig monkey.
This revulsion and fear society feels towards them compels the populaces of England and France to focus only on the difference between them and the creatures. And that is how Quasi and Richard are ultimately sentenced to…
Death by ugliness
They both die at the end, yes. But are we mad about it? Not as much as we would’ve been if the ‘antagonists’ weren’t offed in considerably more horrible ways.
Frankenstein may have been named so because it comes full circle; it begins and ends with Victor’s mistake. After bringing Richard to life, my guy wastes most of his adult life stuck in a demented game of catch as they hunt each other down, until he finally dies at the end from exhaustion and the crushing weight of his narcissism — which was a huge relief because I was getting real tired of his ‘me, me, me’ bullshit.
In Hunchback, Claude Frollo, Quasi’s caretaker and chief tormentor (he also happens to be the archdeacon), becomes consumed by his sexual desire for Esmeralda and starts to hallucinate that his sins and moral corruption the cathedral is alive and is ‘coming after him’.
Then it seemed to him that […] the gigantic cathedral was no longer anything but a sort of prodigious elephant, which was breathing and marching with its pillars for feet, its two towers for trunks and the immense black cloth for its housings.
This fever or madness had reached such a degree of intensity that the external world was no longer anything more for the unhappy man than a sort of Apocalypse,—visible, palpable, terrible.
He eventually meets his end when Quasi shoves him off one of the church’s towers. He initially manages to catch onto one of the protruding spouts, but his cassock becomes undone, and he falls to his death. Don’t we love us some poetic justice?
On the other hand, Quasi's death is only alluded to when they find a deformed skeleton clinging to Esmeralda’s. He deserves better, if you ask me, but there’s a bigger narrative at work here besides villains getting their comeuppance — the deaths of Quasi and Richard are not the end, but a means to achieve it.
Shelley and Hugo are authors who were very much writing against the grain of society’s ideals in their day. Though they attempt some kindness with their respective subjects, their main objective was to demonstrate how differences can be abhorrent, and anomalies quickly discarded in civilised societies.
Richard and Quasimodo experience only exclusion and ridicule, from their creators and caretakers, who’re supposed to nourish them with love and acceptance, to the members of the society who’re supposed to be civilised and discerning.
They inspire fear mainly because they are the ‘unknown’ and are subsequently deigned freaks. In both cases, there is a clear understanding that the Other cannot be accepted due to their physical anomalies and must be eliminated for the dominant in-group to feel safe.
Ultimately, these Gothic fiction twinsies, though relatively short in length, pack powerful — albeit Aesopian — lessons about the collateral damage that can result from the eugenicist and regressive obsession with white-washed beauty conventions that is, unfortunately, still very much prevalent in our current times.
TBH there’s so much more to unpack from these two stories, but Substack is already warning me that this “post is too long for email”. Thus, I leave you with the clip that inspired the email's subheader.
This article is one of my favs so far! Poor Quasimodo though :( And thanks for introducing a new way to organise your articles. I particularly like your rants about certain books (feels like a close friend yet an English prof is telling me about them haha).
Claude Frollo's "Hellfire" is the greatest villain song, crazy how it is in a children's movie 🔥